Most of the top Internet marketers - the people you may think of as 'gurus' - make their money from 1 or all 3 of these areas. They are terrific for the newcomer, since they don't require hundreds or thousands of dollars of startup capital. And they don't require you to already be an expert.

But that doesn't mean you can just join a program and start selling without any kind of training! That's exactly why there are so many internet 'failures' - they thought this business was easy, required no training, and didn't take much time. But we already know those things aren't true.

I also went through the whole "affiliate marketing thing" at the beginning. Thinking I could slap up a site,promote some clickbank products and make money.It's tougher than it looks! Since then, I have finally settled on a couple of program and am doing quite well.

Please feel free to contact me if you need some help finding turn-key, beginner friendly options.

90% of affiliates make under 100 a month (I think that's the stat anyway). So I would not count on making a full-time income unless you can really learn and get super good at the following.

1) How to build a good site that converts

2) SEO - you need TONS of traffic since only maybe 1 out of 200 will buy and your commission per sale may only be around $10. SEO help your site get top ranking in the search engines so more people can find you. There may be over 1 million pages competing for a search term relating to a product you are trying to sell so you have to be really good.
Thousands of people already know how to do this, so you have lots of catch up to do.

3) Then there is lots of trial and error in picking the right merchants and learning the best ways to promote them.

I'm not trying to be negative, just realistic. Too many people think AM is get rich quick. They throw up a couple banners and wonder why they never make a single sale.

HOW LONG? Depends partly on how much money you need to make. My best guess (trying to be realistic not pessimistic) is that if you were EXTREMLY fast at learning this and EXTRMELY good and EXTREMLY lucky you may hit 2000 in 2 years. That's based on the fact that you are starting at 0 and based on the fact that if you have another full time job you won't be able to devote much time to working AM.

If you decide to try - the biggest challenge will be the 1st few months - checking your stats and seeing 0 or $5 here and $5 there and wondering if all the work was worth it. But once you get some sales rolling, if you stay committed and work hard the commissions should very gradually continue to grow.

c1sissy , thank you for your post. If you wanna learn about AM this is the perfect place to do just that. Ive tried on my own with what i thought Affiliate marketing was about for 3 months and i decided to try something else Because i thought that i did everything well enough and with all the hard work i done should pay off. Im talking i spent my 2 hour lunch and dinner breaks on the puter working at this but no sales. I am also self taught and seen that i wanted to learn other area's of ecommerce. There is SO much though that you can easily become distracted from what you set out to do in the first place.
If you want to learn SEO there are some great ebooks out there. Im not endorsing any products but that might be a good place to start if your just beginning in that area. If you like i can forward some books that i got in my personal library.

Mr. Thompson,
I appreciate your post and 411. Do you have any suggestions to hunting for products? Ive heard that googling a niche that you are interested in is a good way to start and then going to overture and using a free tool there to see what words are going cheap on search engines when it comes to the advertising? Of course i tried this with some products and found words not bidded on but they werent bidded on because they were not relevant to what i was marketing. In the end i was left confused and not knowing if i was doing the right thing.

Question: Is Google adsense a economical and effective way to advertise a product?

Catalyst,
once again thank you very much for your wisdom. We need more people like you who will tell it how it really is. That way all the people that arent ambitous will know if they even want to take a crack at something like this. (trying to not offend anyone) I understand alot of people try at this and dont succeed because they expect success overnight. Alot are under the impression that you CAN just throw up some banners , make a mediocre website and maybe pay for a service to advertise for them and they cross their fingers. I know i did that at the beginning. It was fun but i know i was fully committed at that point. I knew that i was fooling myself and got discouraged to soon try my luck in MLM(lol) thinking that i would have a more positive experience with that.
I dont regret spending all the money i did to try a crack at my dreams, it was worth it and the lesson was valuable. I wanted to give up at times and think that people who work from home, investors, business owners,self employed were all myths or a secret club hidden somewhere. I almost gave up. Dreams were just dreams at that time. Making a buck online seemed to elusive. But now that i became a member at this forum there Is hope! There ARE real people doing this and i would like to learn from them and i would like to teach others what i learn. So even if i make only $10 a sale here and there its better than nothing right? lol
In 7 months i'll be getting out of the Navy and hopefully doing awesome in AM.
Just have to keep doing and learning.
Have you ever created a product?
Out of the 3 topics that Mr. Thompson wrote about which do you think would be the best?

sangiovesse
thank you in regards to the ebooks, pm me and I'll send you my address, I would love to see those books that you are talking about.

I also know about getting lost in what you set out to learn. I was learning html, xhtml, web graphics, and decided to give asp a whirl. lol, I wasted time on that venture for now. So I'm back at the xhtml and now css with web graphics.

I notice you are in the Navy. Are you in country right now? I have a son in the marines stationed in the suni triangle right now. And thank you for your service to our country.

Multi-tier and residual income programs seem to be limited to a select list of industries.

If you are not comfortable promoting the industries where you find these merchants (or not comfortable with the merchants themselves), I'd just like to offer that it also possible to be extremely successful without touching any multi-tier or residual income programs. ;)

Finding the right Affiliate Program

There is a small secret as well to earn additional income that I have found to be most helpful, which ever affiliate program you join and put up on your site make sure that you do the following for the following reasons:
Have great SEO work done on your site, this will help boost you’re ranking in the natural searches and most recent studies show that 60% of traffic comes from natural search (see, www.webpronews.com) for reference.
Add Google AdSense to your site, this will help you get crawled that much faster (that part of course is arguable, but it worked for me, after adding it to my site I had double my pages indexed in less then a week). And because if the product you are offering does not appeal to you visitor one of the words in your AdSense program might, and you get paid when they click on it so it wasn’t a total waste of a visitor, plus you gave them another reference to help them find what they need, which is always a plus. You may even want to add a search bar to your site from another affiliate that pays you when searches are done through your site. There are many ways to make a program work for you, make sure you do all your research and have designed your site for maximum performance for your end users and of course for your revenue.